In the chemical industry and the chemical engineering industry, reliance is oftentimes made on using porous bodies, including porous ceramic bodies that are capable of performing or facilitating separations or reactions and/or providing areas for such separations and reactions to take place. Examples of separations or reactions include: filtration of gases and liquids, adsorption, reverse osmosis, dialysis, ultrafiltration, or heterogeneous catalysis. Although the desired physical and chemical properties of such porous bodies vary depending on the particular application, there are certain properties that are generally desirable in such porous bodies regardless of the final application in which they will be utilized.
For example, porous bodies may be substantially inert so that the porous bodies themselves do not participate in the separations or reactions taking place around, on or through them in a way that is undesired, unintended, or detrimental. In applications where it is desired to have the components that are being reacted or separated pass through, or diffuse into, the porous body, a low diffusion resistance (e.g., high effective diffusivity) would be advantageous.
In some applications, the porous bodies are provided within a reaction or separation space, and so they are desirably of high pore volume and/or high surface area, in order to improve the loading and dispersion of the desired reactants, and also to provide enhanced surface area on which the reactions or separations can take place. These applications also require sufficient mechanical integrity to avoid being damaged, i.e., crushed, chipped or cracked, during transport or placement. However, combination of high mechanical strength with high pore volume in a porous body is not easy to achieve because the strength decreases exponentially with increasing porosity.
In view of the above, there is a need for providing porous bodies that have a pore architecture that has enhanced fluid transport properties, particularly gas diffusion properties and high mechanical integrity. Such pore architectures can be achieved only by the precise control of the porous body precursor mixture and the porous body preparation process, which are described in the present invention.